As he stood up
and gazed down and down and down, to his right he saw what looked from up
here such a tiny toylike town, and it recalled suddenly a book he had
once read, as one reads a Jules Verne romance, "The Battle of Dorking,"
a soldier's fairy-tale that had come perilously near being a prophecy.
Before Radmore's eyes--blotting out the noble, peaceful landscape, rich
in storied beauty--there rose an extraordinarily vivid phantasmagoria of
vast masses of armed men in field grey moving across that wide, thickly
peopled valley of lovely villages and cosy little towns. He saw as in a
vision the rich stretches of arable land, the now red, brown, and yellow
spinneys and clumps of high trees, the meadows dotted with sleek cattle,
laid waste--while sinister columns of flames and massed clouds of smoke
rose from each homestead.
"Drive on!" he called out, and the chauffeur was startled by the harsh
note in his employer's generally kindly voice.
On they sped down the great flank of the huge hill, past the hostelry
where Nelson bid a last farewell to his Emma, on and on along narrow
lanes, and between high hedges starred with autumn flowers. And then,
when in a spot so wild and lonely that it might have been a hundred miles
from a town--though it was only some ten miles from Beechfield--something
went wrong with the engine of the car.
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